How To Teach Poetry

Videojug shows you how to break down poetry in order to teach a student the basics. Make sure your teaching is professional and thorough by following the simple rules in this video.

Hi, I'm Carolina Massie from Greater London Tutors, and I'm going to give you some information on how to teach certain subjects. The best way to teach poetry is to start with a list of literary devices or techniques, so for example, devices such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, symbolism, personification. You can find lots of other ones, enjambment, caesura, et cetera et cetera.

Once you've gone through a list of these devices with the student, you would then approach a poem and break it down into those literary devices, so learning how to identify, teaching the student how to identify those literary devices. An example of alliteration here: I imagine this midnight moment. So you'd identify that these Ms are alliterated, and then you'd state why, using device, purpose, effect.

Device: alliteration, the purpose: you choose that with the student, and then you'd state what the effect is, what the poet's desired effect was. This covers the language of the poem, this helps identify what is necessary to write about the language of the poem. You also need to cover the content, what's going on in the poem, the context, any socioeconomic factors surrounding the poem which might be relevant, anything about the poet that is relevant.

Cover the subject, what's the poem about. Structure and form are very important, learning how to identify the length of verses, the punctuation, how those are relevant, what effect those have on the entire poem. The tone of the poem is very important, if it were read out loud, what would the tone of your voice be? Then it's important to practise sample questions.

You can find these on the internet, there are loads of resources out there on the internet that can help you, for example, the BBC websites and SparkNotes and things like that, that help you to break down a poem into the content, the context et cetera. These are the basics on how to teach poetry. .